How Choruses Have Become Ambassadors of Peace

There is perhaps no more fitting metaphor for bridging discord than voices joined in harmony.

Ever since there has been war and conflict—which is to say, since the beginning of human existence—there has been singing. We sing to protest, to mourn, to place a salve on deep wounds, to rally for peace, to hope for a better future.

Choruses have a long history of singing for peace. The documentary film, The Singing Revolution, provides one potent example. Between 1987 and 1991, Estonians sought to free themselves from decades of Soviet occupation by gathering in public to sing forbidden patriotic songs and to rally for independence. Hundreds of thousands turned out to sing, and this played a role in the country eventually—and peacefully—regaining its freedom.

There remain countless cataclysms and conflicts about which to raise one's voice, and today, a number of choral ensembles exist solely to promote peace and reconciliation. Many other choruses, while their missions do not focus explicitly on peacemaking," have nonetheless been moved to perform for peace.

For this article, we asked choruses to tell us about a time when they felt an urgency to stage a concert centered on the themes of peace and reconciliation. Some choruses said they were prompted by specific historical events, others by violence in their own backyards, still others by the conditions of poverty and oppression that are the soil in which conflict and war take root. Their stories reveal how a simple idea can galvanize unexpected bursts of programming creativity, singer enthusiasm, and community engagement.

It Started with a Book Club

Marty Banghart's book club has covered a lot of literary territory in its 18 years, but no work has knocked their socks off quite like Three Cups of Tea—the story of Greg Mortenson's journey from failed climber of Pakistan's treacherous K-2 mountain to the builder of schools for women and children in some of the most war-torn areas of Central Asia.

"I could have sent $100 to Greg's Central Asia Institute," said Banghart, a lifelong music educator . "But I wanted to do more. I believe that education is the basis of a democracy and a civil society, and I strongly believed in what Greg was doing, particularly in educating women."

Putting on a benefit concert was the obvious choice, and Banghart is an old hand at it. In her some 25 years as head of the choral program at North Hanford High School, north of Baltimore, her choirs have raised more than $150,000 for various causes. For this concert, she shot for the moon. She sent a copy of Three Cups of Tea to Z. Randall Stroope, a busy composer whose music she adored, asking if he would conduct her six high school choirs and her intergenerational community chorus, the Deer Creek Chorale, in a number of his pieces focused on themes of peace and reconciliation.

Stroope found the book so compelling and the project so worthwhile that he cleared his calendar. The Stroope work "Inscription of Hope"— based on words inscribed on the walls of a cellar in Köln, Germany, where Jews were hiding from the Nazis during World War II—was chosen as the first piece on the program and inspired the title of the event.

For the second half of the concert, Banghart programmed John Rutter's Mass of the Children, which uses the voices of young children, older children, and adults in a poignant call for peace. She invited the middle school choirs led by Angela Jones to join her massed choir. She then gathered 28 top-notch instrumentalists with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, who agreed to donate a portion of their regular fee to the event. She set a goal to raise $50,000 from the event, with tickets selling for $60.

With the logistics in place, Banghart turned to the educational component. She enlisted her friend Jackie McCosh, a retired English teacher and a singer with Deer Creek Chorale, to head up a book club among the 200 high school students who would be singing in the concert. McCosh gave the students several questions to ponder as they read Three Cups of Tea, and afterward the students wrote essays about what they had learned; a select few were sent to author Mortenson.

Banghart was introduced to fabric artist Gale Jamieson, who agreed to become the project's artist-in-residence and reinforce the important lessons from the book through art projects. Jamieson worked with students at North Hanford High to record their hopes and dreams for the future on cloth strips and weave them into a large dreamcatcher, which would hang above the stage at the concert. They also created an abundance of prayer flags.

The project also partnered with Pennies for Peace, the fundraising initiative of Mortenson's Central Asia Institute. Student ambassadors from the high school choirs went out to elementary schools to advocate for the project, and North Hanford County school children ultimately raised some $6,000—that's 600,000 pennies—to support Mortenson's work.

An interview with Tom Hall, music director of the Baltimore Choral Arts Society, on his arts program on WYPR public radio went a long way toward alerting audiences to the event. But the strongest selling point, Banghart said, was the book. "The more we told the story, the more people passed the book on." By the night of the November 2008 concert, hundreds of people in the schools and in the community had read Three Cups of Tea. The concert raised some $28,500—enough to build a school in Central Asia and run it for five years.

Those involved in "Inscription of Hope" continue to feel its ripple effect. Singer Jenna Hertzog, a high school senior at the time, said that the concert "inspired me to not take, take, take, but just to stop for a second and think to give."

"The children loved the book, they got it, and they were changed by the experience of singing the concert," Banghart said. "It opened their eyes to the world and the conditions in the world. This is what I feel music has the power to do. There is a grander purpose."

Confronting Violence in Their Own Backyard

The Rackham Symphony Choir of Detroit sees itself as something of a provocateur—engaging singers, players, and audience members in multimedia choral "conversations" about some of the toughest issues of the day. It was in that spirit that in 2007 music director Suzanne Acton programmed The Armed Man, Welsh composer Karl Jenkins's searing mass for peace.

The work uses a diverse array of texts and musical traditions to describe the descent into and the terrible consequences of war. As one reviewer wrote, "It's difficult to think of another composer who could successfully place a muezzin's call to prayer within a Mass setting and follow it with a kyrie that quotes both Palestrina and Brazilian drum rhythms."

Acton had experienced the piece with film accompaniment—clips of war images from both World Wars—and wanted to do something similar. Rackham Symphony Choir board member Tom Cucuzza recruited his filmmaker brother to produce a new film to accompany the work. Robert Cucuzza's script, The Armed Boy, brings the issues of war and peace very close to home, focusing on a middle school boy who is being bullied—and his response.

"Bullying is a growing problem in Detroit," Acton said, "and really, all over the country. This looks at the issues of violence and war through the eyes of a middle school boy whose father is away at war."

The 48-minute film, featuring Detroit-area actors and middle school boys, was shot on location in Detroit over the course of four days in December 2006. Volunteers from the Rackham Symphony Choir helped a small professional crew of five to seven people arrange the shoots. Acton worked closely with the filmmaker to synchronize the live performance with the film.

The film premiered at the Choir's 2007 performance in Dearborn, Michigan. The choir staged the event again in Detroit in April 2009. In keeping with the youth theme, boys performed key solos in both performances of The Armed Man. Besher Kashlan, a Detroit middle schooler, studying to be a muezzin, sang the "Call to Prayer." Cellist Gabriel Cabezas, 17, performed the benedictus—which corresponds to the moment in the film when the armed boy learns that his father has been killed in action.

For the 2009 performance, the chorus spun out education activities to drive home the message and encourage attendance at the concert. Elementary school children were recruited to make origami cranes of peace to be hung from the ceiling of the concert venue. The chorus also sponsored a "postcards for peace" contest in which high school art students created images of what peace meant to them. "The winning card was published," Acton said, "and we put a card in each program and asked audience members to send it to someone telling of their experience of the production."

From Acton's perch on the podium, she could feel that the audience's experience of the event was overwhelmingly emotional. "I like to have the audience completely involved," she said, "to create the experience that the composer musically, emotionally, dramatically wanted to convey."

It is all part of the "active listening" that Acton hopes to inspire in audiences. "Music has power to move us, to raise our consciousness, educate us, mobilize us, and inspire and encourage the discouraged. That's why we do it."

War through the Eyes of Women

War stories focus primarily on the experience of soldiers, "but there is a whole other experience going on that is quietly lived and easy to forget about," said Marisa Binder, communications and outreach coordinator for the San Francisco Girls Chorus. Telling that story was the inspiration for Women's Experiences of War, the Alumnae Chorus tribute to the role of women in conflict, presented in May 2010.

Beginning with a message of peace in the form of Ko Matsushita's forceful "Dona Nobis Pacem," the program explored various perspectives of women: as a lover watching her significant other leaving to fight, in songs such as "Johnny's Gone for a Soldier"; as a worker in the Red Cross supporting the war efforts, in Irving Berlin's "Angels of Mercy"; as a prisoner of war, in Margaret Dryburgh's works from Songs of Survival; and as a protester, in the spiritual "Down by the Riverside." The closing piece, the Shaker hymn "Peace," brought the musical journey full circle while leaving listeners with an emotional understanding of the role of women in times of war and peace.

The concert was powerful for audiences and for the singers, Binder said. "It's especially important for a girl's chorus to explore the roles of women and to feel what it was like for them," she said. "We are the gentler sex, supposedly, but we are so strong. We can have a big impact in the world and we have many opportunities to promote peace."

Children's Experience of War

In 2007, Bel Canto Children's Chorus joined with the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia to perform On the Transmigration of Souls, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning symphonic-choral work by John Adams written as a response to the attacks of 9-11.

The work, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and premiered on the first anniversary of the attacks, requires an understanding of the event that prompted it, so Bel Canto's young singers prepped for the concert with an array of activities: a visit to Ground Zero in New York, a meeting with someone who had been there on 9-11, and journal writing and creation of large posters expressing their feelings about the event.

By the next season, Joy Hirokawa, Bel Canto's founder and artistic director, thought the chorus was ready musically and emotionally to take on Robert Jager's I Dream of Peace, a work based on the writings of children experiencing war in the former Yugoslavia. "The text is very powerful and very poignant," she said, "relating what kids are thinking and how are they responding as bombs drop around them—including questions such as, 'How can you take my childhood from me?'"

As with the preparation for On the Transmigration of Souls, Hirokawa had long conversations with the children about the events that prompted the work and how to convey them musically and dramatically. "They completely understood the importance of what they were singing," Hirokawa said. "We should not underestimate what kids are capable of, but we need to prepare them carefully."

Though peacemaking is not part of the Bel Canto mission per se, Hirokawa's own Quaker background and her experience with Philadelphia's Singing City often finds her pursuing themes of peace and reconciliation. The concert reinforced the importance of involving children in the pursuit of peace.

"It is really important for children to see that they can make a difference," she said. "Having children singing about peace is powerful and having children singing children's words about their experience of war is even more powerful."

Searching for a Peaceable Kingdom

The war in Iraq was the issue on which 2008 presidential candidates were staking their political future. "Politics and war were on TV every day and death counts were as commonplace as poll numbers," recalled Miguel Felipe, music director of the Boston Choral Ensemble. "Peace didn't seem to be a word we heard often."

Hoping to add a thoughtful response to the discussion, Felipe and the Ensemble programmed a concert that had at its core Randall Thompson's work The Peaceable Kingdom on texts from the Bible.

Interspersed between the movements of Thompson's piece were a range of other works that commented on themes of war, death, reconciliation, and peace—Josquin des Prez's "Absalon fili mi," Thomas Tomkins' "When David Heard that Absalom was Slain," Salamone Rossi's "Kaddish," Edward Elgar's "Peace, Gentle Peace" from Coronation Ode, Op. 44, and "Look down, fair moon" by Zachary Wadsworth, winner of the Ensemble's first commission competition.

The arc of the program tracked musical style/era, emotional content, and tempo/key relationships. "Ultimately, the audience member was taken down into the darkest emotions of the program with Thompson's 'The paper reeds by the brooks' at the bottom," Felipe said, "and lifted back through reconciliation to peace and hope with our major commission as the turning point."

"We succeeded in stirring our audiences in ways the popular media isn't always able to," Felipe said. "We also blended repertoire across ages so as to illustrate timeless connections in human response to war, death, and hope." The concert program can be downloaded at www.BostonChoral.org.

Music in Desperate Times

At the turn of the millennium in 2000, Ars Choralis in Woodstock, New York, initiated the first of what became a series of concerts that stitch together spoken words and music to call for a "world of goodness, where people work toward compassion and understanding," music director Barbara Pickhardt said.

One of those concerts has taken on a life of its own. In 2006, drawing inspiration from one of the more haunting chapters of the Holocaust, the chorus presented Music in Desperate Times: Remembering the Women's Orchestra of Birkenau. The concert tells the story of 54 women musicians who endured by playing marches and foxtrots as their fellow prisoners were sent off to forced labor or to death in the crematoria.

Music in Desperate Times interweaves orchestral music (Schumann, Chopin, Puccini, Mendelssohn, and others) with spoken memoirs and songs of hope, peace, and resistance sung by the chorus. Orchestra members wore the simple lavender scarves worn by the Birkenau musicians to cover their shaved heads and played arrangements of the same music played in the camps.

The concert received a number of performances in Hudson Valley churches, colleges, and synagogues in 2006 and 2007. Alice Radosh, a Woodstock, New York author and psychologist, experienced the concert at Temple Emanuel and had such a strong response that she talked to Pickhardt about the possibility of staging more performances of the piece. Soon after, Radosh visited her daughter in Berlin who told her that she knew one of the orchestra survivors who had played the accordion at Birkenau and was later transferred to the Ravensbrück camp.

"It was because of that connection between a Woodstock friend and her daughter who lives in Berlin that this concert got to go abroad," Pickhardt said. In March 2009, prior to the Germany tour, Ars Choralis took the production to New York City, performing before 1,100 people at the newly renovated Cathedral Church of Saint John The Divine. The concert was introduced by Dr. Ruth Westheimer, herself a survivor of the Holocaust.

A month later the group traveled to Germany, performing the piece in Berlin at the Heilig Kreuz Passion Church, and selections at the Liberation Day ceremonies on the grounds of the Ravensbrück Concentration Camp in Fürstenberg.

"We sang in a shell of a factory where women had been in forced labor creating clothing for the German army," Pickhardt said. "We sang for survivors, their families, and descendants of survivors."

A few of the members of the Birkenau orchestra were there, as well as survivors of Ravensbrück. "They said to us, 'Tell our story, please. Keep our stories alive. We are old and won't be here much longer. It is so important that people not forget what happened.'"

The Music in Desperate Times concerts remain the most moving experiences for both the chorus and its conductor. "We are a community chorus," said Pickhardt. "We perform a range of repertoire, but we also see music as way to reach out to people, to open hearts, to connect, to break down barriers. That underlying mission ripples through all that we do."

"Music is the perfect vehicle to bring people together," she said, "because we respond to music on a human, visceral level. It is part of us. It transcends barriers, culture, and nationalities, so that we sense our common humanity."

Author Credit
Kelsey Menehan

This article is adapted from The Voice, Fall 2010.